Clay Wheels, a Transistor Radio, and No Brakes |
The boards were oak planks with roller skate trucks bolted on, the wheels stopped dead on a pebble, and every one of us had scabs on both elbows all summer. |
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News for the America we remember |
The first board I ever rode I made in my father's garage, and the design was not mine. Every kid had the same idea at the same time, which is how you know it was in the air. You took a pair of steel roller skates, the clamp-on kind with the key, and you broke them apart at the arch. Then you took a piece of oak, or whatever plank was leaning against the wall, and you bolted the trucks on front and back with whatever screws were in the coffee can on the workbench. |
That was it. No grip tape. No nose. No tail. No concave. A board, four clay wheels, and a fourteen-year-old. We took them down to the boardwalk because the boardwalk was flat and long and the pavement along it was the smoothest surface any of us had access to, and because that was where everybody else already was. |
Now, clay wheels. I want to be accurate about this for anyone who came along later. They were composite, not really clay, and they were hard as a plate and had roughly the same grip on pavement as a dinner plate would. A pebble stopped them. Not slowed. Stopped. The wheel hit a piece of grit the size of a match head and locked, and the board stayed where it was, and you kept going at whatever speed you had been doing, straight onto elbows and palms and the particular humiliation of looking back at the board sitting innocent on the concrete. |
Which is why every one of us had the same elbows. Scabbed over, healing, freshly opened again, all summer, every summer. Palms with the skin sanded off the heel. Hips bruised purple through cutoffs. Nobody wore a helmet. It genuinely did not exist as a concept. We were barefoot half the time. And the sound of all this was the surf music, which was happening at exactly the same moment and belonged to us in a way that no music has ever quite belonged to me since. Somebody always had a transistor radio, the kind with the chrome grille and the nine-volt that never lasted, and it sat on the curb or hung from a belt loop, and Dick Dale or the Ventures or whatever the local station was playing that hour came out thin and tinny and perfect while we fell and got up and fell again on clay wheels that would stop for a |
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